Our Conference Strategy

The New Rules conference is designed to push agencies toward cutting edge aproaches and ideas. Below you find a description and visual of how our conference work. Pleaseclick here for a 10 page detailed description of the New Nonprofit Rules conference.

To show you the stategy for the conferences a strategy map and its description follows:

The value curves (the graphed points that create a line) for our Mission Movers strategy canvas show three types of conferences: high-end, average cost, and Mission Mover. Each group has a different set of priorities for putting on a conference. Why is this? One assumption is that high-end organization executives like to get away to nice locations and have all of their needs met, and they believe that the high price they are paying means they are getting cutting edge information that gives them a competitive advantage.



Another assumption is that smaller nonprofits like to go to hotels too and have a nice lunch served and sit in nice breakout sessions. We also assume that people like breakout sessions, and nice big handout books full of information that they can use when they leave -- even though it will never be opened again. Our goal was to challenge all these assumptions and learn how to put on a conference that participants leave saying “that is the best conference I have been to.”

What did we learn by doing the above strategy canvas? First, we made sure all our conferences had cutting edge material. To our surprise, while we got strong feedback for having some of the best information, people still did not rate our events that high.

Next, we recognized we were spending a lot of time and moneymaking and serving lunch. So at the next event we had people go out to lunch on their own. We had to make sure we chose a venue where that is possible. We were pleasantly to find that no one ever asked why we don’t offer lunch, and they actually like taking a break off site. It also gave people a chance to process some of the cutting edge material.

We then began to question the idea of handouts. How important are they, and how do ours rate to other conferences? Again, our research turned up surprising results. Keep handouts to a minimum, no color and make them simple. We never would have asked the handouts question if the above strategy canvas strategy did not ask us to compare ourselves.

This comparison spurred a set of questions that would not have happened if it were not for the visual of the strategy canvas. Up to this point much of our work had been to differentiate our events from others, but that didn’t seem to make a big difference to attendees.

Next we asked what would make us completely different from other events and create great value for our attendees. We decided that we would provide pre-conference reading material so we could spend more time doing activities and less on presentation. This made a big splash with attendees but we felt it was still not enough. At this time we are testing post-conference follow-up on an assignment we gave all attendees. To our shock, 74% of attendees have done the homework at some level compared to our projection of just 40%.

The follow-up with nonprofits has now become part of our value curve. The next factor we plan to test in the next 60 days is adding follow-up cohorts for motivated people who want to go deeper in a group without paying high price consulting fees. We hope this value curve will set us apart from everyone else. As we went through our canvas did you notice that the focus was not on the activity but how we did it – strategy.